I had never heard of St. Louis-style pizza, but it doesn’t sound that bad from the Wikipedia link (apart from the description of fused white processed cheese). I like thin crust pizza (cracker-like might be pushing it) and two places whose pizza I’ve found enjoyable (one local, one chain (Donato’s) cut it into (mostly) squares. If you’re eating really greasy/oily pizza (which can be good), square pieces are safer than long wedges, which tend to sag at the narrow points and drip fluid into your lap.
Is Imo’s really the only place that serves St. Louis-style pizza, so the critic couldn’t have been referring to any other joint?
As for Papa John’s, I suspect the negative responses are related to saturation advertising for a mediocre product, featuring a somewhat obnoxious spokesperson.
He talked about his hotel having cards for the “unnamed” pizza place, so that’s pretty much got to be Imo’s, which he essentially acknowledged in his response.
Besides which, I think advising listeners to avoid all mom-and-pop pizza in a major metro area if they happen to be there is shady if you haven’t tried it yourself. Especially when he has said that people shouldn’t be criticizing the new Star Trek show if they haven’t watched it. And that’s just people in comments, not professionals like himself.
…I would have blocked you too. You broke twitter etiquette by tagging in the restaurant. (And I’m not going to listen to the podcast: but just because you inferred he was referring about a particular chain doesn’t mean he actually was.) You weren’t criticising him. You were arguing with him. I’m sure he has more important things to do than to argue with a random anonymous person on twitter. Over pizza for fucks sakes. You posted the entire interaction between the two of you and it is crystal clear that Sepinwall is not being a jerk. He answered your question. But you “sea-lioned.” Blocking you when you took that route was entirely appropriate.
Cracker crust pizza is quite delicious. Here in Chicago, our standard pizza is square cut, as well. The term these days for pizza nerds is “tavern style” and “party cut.” I wouldn’t quite call our pizza cracker crust, though some people do. I’ve had plenty of pizza that actually was crackery–both in texture and in the use of baking powder instead of yeast as leavening. Chicago pizza is leavened with yeast. The edge pieces can be on the crispy side, but the interior does normally have a bit of bend and fold to it, especially with large pies. Here’s what I would call a typical Chicago thin crust. It’s also often dusted with cornmeal on the bottom.
To be honest, it’s one of my favorite styles of pizza. (My three favorite styles are the classic Neapolitan, Chicago thin, and Detroit for when I’m in the mood for a thick pie.) Sweet sauces are not uncommon, though I’m not as much a fan of that. I tend to avoid the places with the sugar sauces. But Chicago and St. Louis is not alone in that. Look at Papa John’s. Heck, even whatever the default Domino’s sauce is is quite sweet to my tastes.
Then you are promiscuous with your blocking IMO. I’ve blocked people for porn-spamming me…and that’s it, AFAICR. People have attacked me pretty harshly, and I never blocked them. In theory, if someone constantly came at me with, say, their wishes for my children to be harmed, I’d block them–but I’ve been fortunate not to need that contingency thus far.
Sure I was. So what? That’s pretty standard on Twitter. And yet I posted the other interactions to show that I’m not just some pest that constantly argues with everything he says. But it takes two to have an argument, which leads to the next point:
Then he could have felt free to just stop at any time. I can guarantee you I would not come back with “what do you say to that, huh? Huh?” He stops, I stop. And while to you, ignoring someone and blocking them amount to fairly close to the same thing, doing it from Sepinwall’s position is more like getting banned from the SDMB–because the replies to his tweets are like a comment section where you can chat with others, like a thread on a TV show here. So a ban without warning there is, I remain convinced, a wild overreaction regardless of what you think about the argument itself. It would be like a mod coming in here and saying “You’re arguing with Banquet Bear, therefore I now declare with no warning that you may never return to this site to comment or even read it” (without taking special measures, obv.).
ETA: If you think a discussion on a major site’s podcast is like two people having a private conversation down at a wharf…well, I don’t know what to tell you.
When I was in college, a lot of people seemed to like Papa John’s (or, at least if was often eaten). It was new to the area then (early 2000s). A friend said she liked it and we got it and it had garlic dipping sauce (which seemed to be the part she actually liked to me). Only time I ever had it. It wasn’t horrific or anything to me. It was just interchangeable with “gas station pizza” (Hunt Bros. and the like that you can get from a convenience store). That was over 15 years ago, and I’ve never had it again since.
Tangent to the tangent: I always had the same basic assumption about “gas station pizza”, and if I found myself in desperate enough straits to get food from a convenience store, I would get a sandwich or microwaveable burrito instead. But then my wife insisted that Casey’s pizza (Casey’s, for those outside the Midwest or even some portions of the MW like Michigan, is a huge chain of gas station convenience stores with about 2,000 locations) is really good. I was pretty skeptical, but I tried it. It’s true: it’s amazingly good!
…“promiscuous” is a word with pretty blatant connotations. I am not “promiscuous” with my blocking. I am judicious.
Well good-for-you.
I have a different blocking policy. Having different criteria doesn’t make me a jerk.
You claimed you were engaging in critique. But you weren’t engaging in critique. You were arguing with him.
I would fully expect that somebody with 120 thousand followers would not remember a couple of interactions with a random anonymous person on the net.
You may not have noticed this in your rush to label Sepinwall a jerk and to post this thread: but this is exactly what he did. You showed no signs you were going to stop. So he stopped you instead.
He did stop. You didn’t stop. You got blocked. End of story.
The simple solution to not getting banned from a discussion is to not to engage in the sort of discussion that gets you banned. Sea-lioning is fucking annoying. Sea-lioning was used to great effect by the goobergate crowd to harass, silence, and shut down conversation. The easiest way to stop sea-lioning is a block.
You aren’t owed a response. You are free to say whatever the hell you like. But you cannot demand that you are listened too. Blocking you isn’t a “wild overreaction.” It is a very simple
But that isn’t what happened. What happened was that you were rude and demanding to a popular person on twitter and they blocked you. They don’t owe you a warning. If you can no longer read or comment on threads that Sepinwall starts then tough shit.
Maybe Sepinwall isn’t the one who is “wildly overreacting.” Maybe it took a temporary block to show you how annoying your behaviour can be.
No, not accurate. I responded (with two tweets, in quick succession) to his three-parter to me. Had he gone silent, I would not have said anything further about it. I had said my piece. Now that I’m unblocked, come to think of it, I could go and tweet something more about it now, if I had a mind to. But I didn’t and don’t.
ETA: I’m sure this is exactly how you would have addressed me if you had never seen any of my posts outside of Cafe Society. Way to bring in grudges from other boards.
…I’m completely accurate. He stopped. We can see that he stopped. How on earth can you claim he didn’t stop? You suggested if he didn’t want to engage you that he should stop engaging you. Thats exactly what he did.
Eh. Imo’s quality is uneven. The one by where I live, I might be tempted to eat if I were literally starving. The one by where I work is sublime. Provel is an only mildly sharper variant of provolone. Get over it, people; it’s not toe-cheese.
I prefer thin crust, a nice, crispy thin crust; hand-tossed is about the thickest pie I care for. Everything else tastes like someone’s serving me pizza toppings on a slice of Wonder Bread, or even on a (shudder) piece of Texas Toast.
And for all the Chi-Town snobs: St. Louis-style bears a much closer resemblance to the pizza(s) I had in Italy than the doughy abominations you call pizza.
And New Yawk? I’ve had your style, too; so I really don’t see where you get off criticizing St. Louis-style; if anything, complaints of…plagiarism?..might be in order (we’ll just leave who has the right to complain about whom for another thread, hmmm?). But hey, we cut ours in squares, so nyah! Ours is nothing like yours!
Yeah!
Actually, the best store-bought pizza I’ve had that bears the closest resemblance to what I saw actual Italians eating is California Pizza Kitchen.
For my money, though, give me an Elicia’s (local chain, maybe 6 stores, all in South City/County :() any day of the week. Their carnivore special should come with a warning against consumption by expecting mothers, anyone with high blood pressure, or any kind of cardiac condition.
St. Louis style bears quite a close resemblance to Chicago thin crust, the type of pizza we Chicagoans normally eat. They’re dead ringers for each other until you bite in Once again, this is what a normal day-to-day Chicago pizza looks like. It is not a deep dish.
And neither are very much anything like a Neapolitan pie (especially Imo’s pizza, which doesn’t even have yeast in it–seriously how can you compare Imo’s with an Italian pie? Of the styles listed, New York’s is the most similar to something you might get in Italy.) The problem with Provel isn’t that it’s sharp. It’s the consistency of it. It’s a process cheese, chosen specifically because it does melt so well, but it’s just a bit odd on pizza.
Also, speaking of deep dish, deep dish is NOT supposed to be doughy. It’s NOT a pan pizza or a Sicilian style pizza with a thick doughy base. Detroit style pan is doughy (and delicious). Chicago deep dish is not. It’s just deep on the ingredients. Even Wikipedia has it right: “Although the entire pizza is very thick, in traditional Chicago-style deep-dish pizzas, the crust itself is thin to medium in thickness.” Mind you, I’m not a huge fan of deep dish, but "doughy"is not a word I would use to describe it.
But why should he or Sepinwall care about your opinion on appropriate blocking more than their own? It’s his twitter, not yours, and he didn’t stop you from handling your own blocks however you like.
He did stop the conversation, completely and fully. That’s what blocking does. I’m going to say again, you come off as highly argumentative and slightly unhinged in this discussion and in your comments. I can easily see why the guy wouldn’t want to spend energy on this, and wouldn’t want to have his twitter feed taken up with a spat accusing him of a lack of journalistic integrity over an offhand comment about lame pizza.
This is part of the ‘unhinged’, BTW - you seem to think you’re able to set rules for how other people run their twitter feed. But since you’re not King of Twitter, you just don’t get to do that, and have to accept that if you grossly violate twitter etiquette and set out to argue with people who don’t want to argue or argue too aggressively, you’ll probably get blocked.
Growing up here, I’ve never felt that Provel was necessary for a pizza to be “St. Louis style”, it was just a commonly-used local cheese. But as an adult, I’ve seen thin-crust, cut-into-squares pizza with regular cheese called “Detroit style”. And now you’re saying it’s what they normally eat in Chicago.
Anybody know the actual origin of this kind of pizza? Thin but not floppy-like-Brooklyn thin, with toppings all the way to the edge, cut into squares? With or without Provel processed cheese food?
And totally off topic, what ever happened to Pizza in a Cup? It was so good, he ran the old Cup o’ Pizza guy out of business. Then what?
I’ve lived in the Chicago area my whole life, and Pulykamell’s pictures are what I think of as pizza. In my experience the only time they’re cut in pie piece shapes is when it’s a small pizza, or when it’s a deep dish pizza.
It’s a general Midwestern style. You see it in Wisconsin, as well. I’ve personally never heard thin crust referred to as “Detroit-style,” but this is not to say nobody refers to it as that (though googling “Detroit thin crust” and finding articles about actual Detroit pizza, I don’t see it being common, as opposed to googling “Milwaukee thin crust” or “Chicago thin crust.”) To me, “Detroit style” is stuff like Buddy’s and Jet’s. There’s even a thorough Wikipedia article on it. But, yes, Chicagoans eat thin crust, cut-into-squares pizza the vast majority of the time. It’s your standard party pizza, you’re standard “I don’t feel like cooking, let’s get delivery from the local place” pizza. Deep dish is more special occasion pizza. I would say I personally consume deep dish one a year on average, at most. I don’t think I’ve even had a deep dish or stuffed pizza this year, and I’m not even sure I had one last year. Chicago or Midwestern thin-crust, probably twenty times a year.
There are regional differences in the Midwest pizzas though. Some are more crackery than others, Imo’s being an exemplar that goes the full cracker route not even using any yeast in their dough. Some use a sweeter sauce than others. (You have both sweet and unsweetened sauce places here in Chicago.)
You can here about the various styles of American pizza here. I’m amused that they refer to St. Louis pizza as a variant of Chicago thin crust. I’d be more inclined to refer to the entire category as Midwestern thin crust, with slight regional variations within.
